Experimenting with Zotero
April 15th 2010 05:00
Yesterday at work I spent a good deal of time investigating the bibliographic reference program, Zotero. It comes as an add-on to the Firefox browser, and only functions within Firefox (there are no versions available for Internet Explorer, Opera or Google Chrome).
Basically it's intended for keeping track of book title references, and information related to them, along with links, articles and pdfs, etc. All these can be collected together, searched and variously sorted within the programme (which looks very simple on the surface, but is actually pretty powerful.)
By the time I was getting to grips with it, I'd worn my brain out, (and anyway had an appointment at the doctor's for a piece of minor surgery on my eyelid, which was kind of reducing my concentration as the day wore on). I was going back through my copy of Microsoft Access, picking up the links to books and articles online and seeing how easy it was to transfer these into Zotero.
Supposedly Amazon books and the like are all set up for Zotero to automatically pick up the bibliographic information by 'translators' but I couldn't get it to function properly with Amazon. However, as I say, it's early days, I was a bit distracted, and I've got more time up my sleeve to get it sussed before the boss wants to try and use it as an alternative to EndNotes, which is a more well-known bibliographic programme but very expensive. The only cost with Zotero comes when you want to store stuff online through them. Even that cost is pretty minimal - certainly for the amount of information we'd be uploading.
So, you may hear more about Zotero yet. Once my eyelid has ceased to be swollen and black and blue!
Basically it's intended for keeping track of book title references, and information related to them, along with links, articles and pdfs, etc. All these can be collected together, searched and variously sorted within the programme (which looks very simple on the surface, but is actually pretty powerful.)
By the time I was getting to grips with it, I'd worn my brain out, (and anyway had an appointment at the doctor's for a piece of minor surgery on my eyelid, which was kind of reducing my concentration as the day wore on). I was going back through my copy of Microsoft Access, picking up the links to books and articles online and seeing how easy it was to transfer these into Zotero.
Supposedly Amazon books and the like are all set up for Zotero to automatically pick up the bibliographic information by 'translators' but I couldn't get it to function properly with Amazon. However, as I say, it's early days, I was a bit distracted, and I've got more time up my sleeve to get it sussed before the boss wants to try and use it as an alternative to EndNotes, which is a more well-known bibliographic programme but very expensive. The only cost with Zotero comes when you want to store stuff online through them. Even that cost is pretty minimal - certainly for the amount of information we'd be uploading.
So, you may hear more about Zotero yet. Once my eyelid has ceased to be swollen and black and blue!
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